


say goodnight and go

by pathstotread



Category: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 08:40:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15770556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pathstotread/pseuds/pathstotread
Summary: “Hand holding at school, sure. Arm around the shoulders, fine. Cuddling is not covered in the contract.”The origins of Lara Jean’s lock screen photo.





	say goodnight and go

**Author's Note:**

> For Jo, on the occasion of her birthday and the fact that she decreed it TATBILB week, all shall love her and despair, etc. 
> 
> This started out as a twitter thread and just kind of...grew a little bit.Thanks to Anj for the comments/edits!
> 
> A few things:  
> \- Mostly based on movie canon  
> \- I know the lighting/cushion fabric in the photo doesn’t support this headcanon, don’t @ me, just let me have this  
> \- Title is from “Goodnight and Go” by Imogen Heap, but Lara Jean’s lovesick vibe is brought to you by “1000 Times” by Sara Bareilles.

Lara Jean’s eyes open to darkness, the dim glow from the kitchen appliances the only illumination. It’s not uncommon for her to pass out on the couch after a movie marathon. Margot always used to wake her up and shuffle her to bed, insisting that sleeping on the couch is bad for her back. Kitty just leaves her to her own devices.

What is uncommon is the warm chest under Lara Jean’s cheek, rising and falling slightly. Her eyes dart up and there’s Peter, his eyelashes fanned out against his cheeks, dead to the world.

They’d been watching _Dirty Dancing_ with Kitty, the Song girls’ pick after Peter made the dubious call to show _The Departed_ to an eleven-year-old the week before. 

(After their argument about the ski trip, she’d been surprised to see him show up on her doorstep with a jumbo box of Milk Duds. “Come on, Covey, all I know is that there’s dancing, and it’s dirty, and there’s a line about carrying a watermelon and I’m ready to find out why that’s hilarious.”)

Lara Jean remembers nodding off halfway through, her head bobbing onto Peter’s shoulder, but she has no idea how that led to this scenario, and she certainly doesn’t know how she feels about it. 

She and Peter have gotten pretty accustomed to casual touches the past few months, but always in mixed company. Hand holding at school, sure. Arm around the shoulders, fine. Cuddling is not covered in the contract.

And here’s why this is a problem: she wants so badly to bury her face in his neck, to spend the rest of the night curled up next to him. If he were hers, if this were real and not an increasingly intricate farce, she could. She knows her dad is at the hospital for a delivery, and Kitty has long since put herself to bed. No one would know.

But he’s not hers. It’s not real. And if he wakes up with her in his arms, if they have to have an actual, out loud conversation about this, she is absolutely going to die.

So she silently extricates herself from under his arm, moving to a sitting position. She gives herself exactly thirty seconds to look at his sleeping face before reaching out to nudge his shoulder.

He stirs, blinking owlishly in the dim light. “Lara Jean?” His voice, low and rumbly with sleep, almost does her in. 

“Hey,” she whispers. “We fell asleep.”

Peter nods, pushing himself up to sit next to her. “What time is it? I should call my mom.” He scrubs a hand over his face.

Lara Jean glances at the microwave clock. “You still have fifteen minutes until curfew, you can make it.”

Silently they rise in unison and walk to the front door, Lara Jean wrapping her arms around herself as Peter shoves his feet into his sneakers.

He reaches a hand out and for a heart-stopping moment she thinks that this is it, that he’ll pull her closer and break all the rules they’ve made, but he doesn’t. He smooths her hair back from where it’s fallen in her face and says “I’ll text you tomorrow.”

She stands at the door long after he’s reached his car and driven away.

—

The next day, Lara Jean opens her camera roll to see a photo of herself curled up on Peter’s chest, his arm secure around her back. There’s no question as to who’s the culprit - she’s changed her passcode twice, but Kitty always figures it out.

She should send the photo to Peter, tell him to post it to Instagram with a mushy caption designed to make Gen throw the mother of all fits. She gets as far as attaching the message in a text, but deletes it before she can press send. 

She sets the photo as her background instead, spends an appalling amount of time lying on her bed with her hair flipped over the end, locking and unlocking her screen to watch it pop up.

When Kitty comes to get her for dinner, Lara Jean tosses her phone to the side like she’s been caught committing a crime. Kitty gives her a look that would have hardened criminals quaking in their boots, but says only, “Dad says dinner in five minutes.”

Chris spots the photo when they’re talking at her locker on Monday morning, coos over it with her chin tucked over Lara Jean’s shoulder. “You two really are disgusting,” she says, but from Chris, that’s basically an OTP manifesto.

“What are we looking at?” Peter says from behind Chris. Lara Jean jumps, her fingers fumbling to lock the screen. Chris gives her a questioning look, but smoothly says, “sorry, PK, but when the Queer Eye guys post thirst traps on Insta, this is a no boyfriend zone.”

After Peter has walked them to French class and headed off to Bio with a wave, Chris whirls on Lara Jean. “What’s up with you?”

Lara Jean shakes her head. She can’t tell her best friend that that photo is the realest thing she has of her and Peter, can’t explain that when he’s gone, it’s the only thing she’ll have that wasn’t staged for someone else’s benefit. She can’t give Peter the chance to take that away from her - he wouldn’t mean to, but he _would_.

“Nothing,” she says. “Just trying to keep the public mushiness to a minimum.”

Chris snorts. “That horse left the stable a few hundred Kavinsky heart-eye gazes ago, but sure.”

—

“What’s this?” Peter asks as they’re swiping through her photos at the diner.

They’ve been together, _really_ together, for all of two days now, and they’ve already taken so many dumb kissy-face selfies that Lara Jean wonders if there’s some cutesy couple record out there that they’re trying to break. She’d be embarrassed if she weren’t so stupidly happy.

(They’re working on the record for how many places they can make out in his Jeep without getting caught. Time will tell on that one.)

“Hmm? Oh.” Her breath catches when she sees the photo he’s landed on. “Kitty took that of us, that night we fell asleep watching movies.”

“You never sent this to me,” he says. By the furrow of his brow she thinks he gets a little bit of _why_.

“No, I didn’t,” she says simply, shrugging her shoulders.

Peter pulls her in, kisses the top of her head. “Lara Jean, that night...I didn’t want to leave.”

Lara Jean smiles up at him. “I know,” she says, because she does now. “I didn’t want you to either.”

She grabs her phone back, turns away from him.

“What are you doing, Covey?”

“You’ll see,” she says, tapping at the screen.

His phone dings with a notification. He unlocks his screen and Lara Jean bites her lip to keep from grinning.

“Damn,” is all he says, but she’s pretty sure this is the Kavinsky heart-eye gaze that Chris is always going on about.

She kisses his cheek and peeks at his screen to see the post she’s tagged him in on Instagram, captioned: _#tbt Movie night naps with PK._

_end_


End file.
